It all started very innocently.  My Dad wears a lot of dress socks.  He has to – and he wears them out.  I wanted to learn how to make socks so I could make him a truly indulgent pair of dress socks.  I learned how to knit and purl, stockinette and garter, moss stitch and slip and yarn over.  I made a scarf, then, a washcloth, then several dishrags.  Finally I felt ready to begin socks.

I picked up some self-striping yarn (cool, hu?  I didn’t even know yarn could do that until I started knitting and then there were stripes!) and very slowly followed the directions for Silver’s Sock Class – the Basic Sock. 

I am awkward, but the sock is neat.  And it’s for me.  My Dad’s will be black.

I started out with five bamboo double-pointed needles and only needed four to make a sock.  Nice – there’s an extra.  I knitted a bit and took these photos and knitted some more.  I took it in the car and worked on it whenever I could.  A few more days, and a few inches after this shot, a bunch of kids ran THROUGH my purse in church and dragged my sock several aisles away.  When we recovered it, a needle was in splinters and a row was in loops.  But I still had two needles in the sock, and I was able to use my extra needle to pick up the dropped stitches.  Whew – disaster averted.

A few days later, just before I started the heel, I laid down my work for a minute to take a child to the potty.  When I got back, my daughter had two needles in her hand and was unwinding the ball of yarn.  There are four needles total in use – two remained in the sock.  I patiently picked up the dropped stitches and compulsively locked the sock in my room when not working on it.

I “turned the heel” and “shaped the gusset” and was an inch away from the toes when there was a sudden emergency that needed my immediate attention.

You guessed it.  I came out to find all four needles in my daughter’s hands and piles of curly yarn on the floor where she had unraveled inches of my sock.  I tried and tried to pick up all the stitches, but I couldn’t. 

On a recent road trip, I got an inch into it before I dropped several stitches and couldn’t recover.  Started over.

Got an inch into it and dropped them again.  Cursed bumpy road!

I now have a ball of yarn in my bedroom with four bamboo knitting needles.  And it can stay there until I recover.